Things I learned from “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius”

For a kid’s movie, I’ve always liked “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius”. How can you not? The plot takes every kid’s greatest fantasy of not having parental supervision, and crushes it by telling the kids that they’re helpless without their parents and should stop being unappreciative little brats. And if that’s not enough, just watch the awesome scene where Jimmy and his friends build a fleet of ships out of amusement park rides, then blast off into space while that shitty cover of “Kids in America” plays. Seriously, that shit was just fucking rad.

That said, this movie has some very glaring flaws that spit in the face of reality and left me saying “Um, WTF?”. This article assumes that you, the reader, have seen the movie. So if you haven’t, you should probably stop reading now.

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I said stop reading asshole. Yeah, that’s right, I knew you’d keep reading regardless. If you don’t want to sit there saying to yourself “What the fuck is he talking about?”, here’s a torrent of the movie. Go watch it, seriously.

1. The Air Force fucking sucks.

In the beginning of the movie, NORAD is able to track Jimmy and Carl flying around in their shitty homemade rocket, and sends up four fighter jets to investigate. Yet, NORAD can’t detect a fleet of gigantic alien spaceships, nor can they detect an entire amusement park taking off into space? Alright, I suppose one could argue that if the aliens are capable of interstellar travel, they’re most certainly capable of evading our radar systems. But you can’t tell me that not a single person eyewitnessed this massive armada of big-ass chicken-shaped spaceships:

“NORAD maintains that it did not witness or detect any large unidentified flying objects in or around Retroville on that night. Upon further analysis, NORAD has concluded that the pictured objects are of lenticular clouds mixed with swamp gas and possibly a weather balloon.”

Okay, maybe Retroville is in the middle of Bumfuck, and the only people who were able to see and possibly report the giant ships to the military (whose radars couldn’t pick them up because of radar-evading technology) were the adults who were abducted. Fair enough, I can swallow that horse pill, I suppose. But how were the kids able to successfully launch an entire amusement park into space with not even a single fighter being sent up to investigate? NORAD was able to detect Jimmy’s ghetto rocket, so why weren’t they able to detect the amusement park?

Hilariously enough, Jimmy’s computer system was able to detect the fleet before they even entered the Earth’s atmosphere. What the fuck?!

It’s obvious what happened here. This whole abduction was an inside job. Dick Cheney ordered NORAD to stand down, and told them that the whole thing was part of a training exercise. A cover story about a bunch of eggs was concocted and spoon-fed to the gullible public in order to justify an assault on the Yolkian planet and further erode our civil liberties, while the REAL masterminds continued to remain in the shadows. Alex Jones will be running a special on his radio show next week, called “The Retroville Abductions: Cracking the Shell of the Yolkian Lie”. Stay informed, Infowarriors!

2. You can breathe in space.

As it turns out, you don’t need an oxygen supply while flying through space. Jimmy and his friends were not only able to cruise openly through interstellar space, but camp out on an asteroid:

Remember in first grade when your science teacher said that fire needs oxygen to sustain itself? Your science teacher was a fucking liar.

Helmets are for pussies, and so is oxygen. Looks like NASA’s been wasting countless billions of dollars on life support systems that we didn’t need. Now that Jimmy Neutron has shown us the way, we may begin the colonization of space.

3. Kids are stupid.

After the aliens kidnap all of the parents, they leave these elaborately forged notes for the children:

The children think nothing of a typed ambiguous letter, until almost two days later when Jimmy says “Hey, wait a minute…” and decides to run it through a handwriting analysis machine, which determines that it’s a forgery after comparing it with other notes from his parents.

Seriously? Even for a bunch of 9 year old kids, that’s fucking retarded. Designing a fleet of ships capable of interstellar travel, out of amusement park rides, in a span of two days? Piece of cake. Recognizing an obviously fake letter? Way too fucking hard.

4. An advanced alien race can be easily thwarted on their own planet by a bunch of kids.

Forget home-field advantage. Forget high-tech weaponry. Forget outnumbering the invaders at least 100 to 1. Forget having a gigantic mutant chicken on your side. Apparently none of that means shit when you’re going up against a bunch of grade school brats and a robotic dog.

The whole final showdown between the kids and the aliens was bullshit, starting with the scene where Jimmy uses Libby’s cellphone to call the dog. He uses her cellphone, a device that relies on pre-programmed satellites, to make a call. On another fucking planet. Here I am with one of the country’s largest providers in the middle of one of the country’s largest cities, and I’m getting three out of five signal bars. Then there’s this asshole making calls on other fucking planets. Libby attempts to use common sense, remarking “I don’t think my service plan covers anything outside our solar system.”:

Jimmy uses her phone to make contact with his robotic dog, who is being dissected by an alien scientist. The dog breaks everyone out of the prison (which is absurdly primative even by Earth standards), and they all go to stop the aliens from sacrificing their parents to the giant chicken. They beat- no, humiliate, the alien guards by beating them with shit like a Walkman, an inhaler, and a Nerf gun, all while some upbeat 80’s song plays in the background. Finally, they get their parents and escape on a Yolkian spaceship, which Sheen inexplicably knows how to pilot. Way to get your shit wrecked on your own planet by a bunch of little kids, you fucking pussies. Yolkians are quite possibly the most limp-dicked motherfuckers in the entire universe. Even Invader Zim could beat them with no problem. Hell, fucking Jar Jar Binks could single-handledly enslave their shitty planet.

You know what would have been really awesome? If Predator was in the movie. Holy fucking shit bro:

Forget the fucking Yolkians. Predator would make a big ass omelet out of those worthless motherfuckers and eat it with a side of bacon. I could totally see a Jimmy/Predator crossover happening. Here’s how it would probably go down.

Jimmy and his friends are returning from the Yolkian planet after saving their parents. Little did they know that they were being watched the entire time by a Predator, whose cloaking device allowed him to silently observe Jimmy’s tactics against the Yolkians. It has deemed Jimmy and his friends worthy prey for a hunt. The Predator follows the stolen Yolkian ship back to Earth in its own cloaked ship. As the Yolkian ship prepares to enter Earth’s atmosphere, Predator shoots out an engine and sends it plummeting into a Central American jungle, ironically the same one from the first movie. Jimmy, Carl, Sheen, Cindy, Libby, and Goddard are the only ones who survive the crash. As they make their trek back to civilization, all of Jimmy’s friends are gruesomely butchered one-by-one as the Predator claims its trophies. Finally, only Jimmy and Goddard remain. Jimmy uses Goddard’s built-in thermal imaging ability to locate the Predator, who immediately counters with its plasma caster. Goddard is hit and explodes into irreparable pieces. Jimmy attempts to run from the Predator, only to be scooped up by its net trap. Predator then takes his time disemboweling Jimmy and turning his skull into a trophy. The final scene shows Predator in his ship with Jimmy’s skull on a shelf in the background. A computer on the ship shows an image of the Punisher, setting the stage for the most awesome battle to ever take place in the history of the universe.

Come to think of it, I don’t even know why I said I liked Jimmy Neutron. The only way it could have been more logically unsound was if… would be… fuck it, they couldn’t have made it more logically unsound if they tried.